Dudenlegitimiertes vs. ethnolektales Deutsch

RealitÃ¤t vs. mediale Inszenierungen

Applied to language, the topological terms â€¹centerâ€º vs. â€¹peripheryâ€º have to be transformed into metaphorical qualities of â€¹localityâ€º because there is no â€¹centerâ€º in the Saussurian notion of language as a â€¹systÃ¨me oÃ¹ tout se tientâ€º. A social definition of â€¹centerâ€º and â€¹peripheryâ€º in terms of legitimate norms vs. stigmatized use can be based on speakersâ€™ attitudes towards the variety space of a given language â€“ in our case German. Emerging ethnolects in big German cities are perceived by regional and national media and dominant bourgeois middle class as a kind â€¹deficitâ€º bad German which is more a slang than a regular German variety. A closer sociolinguistic look at this ethnic style reveals that there are only a few variable features of this emerging variety which are perceived in a stereotyped way as â€¹bad Germanâ€º: in particular phonetic and prosodic variants, the omission of articles and local prepositions and some syntactic simplifications. There is no homogenous, but a very heterogeneous variety space according to social group membership. It will be shown and illustrated by examples of an oral corpus that the stereotyped â€¹badâ€º connotations associated with these styles are an invention of the media and have to be corrected by sociolinguists. This article will contribute to a better sociolinguistic understanding of an ethnolectal variation in German cities.